Haggling swirls as Russian convoy halts outside Ukraine

Wednesday

Aug 13, 2014 at 11:16 PM

By Neil MacFarquhar THE NEW YORK TIMES

MOSCOW — Confusion swirled around the fate of an enormous Russian aid convoy as it apparently halted Wednesday at a military base in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, temporarily suspending its march toward southeastern Ukraine.

Moscow and Kiev, Ukraine, seemed headed toward at least a standoff over the convoy, with Russia saying it still expected the hundreds of trucks to be allowed across the border and Ukraine vowing that they would be barred. Later in the day, though, Kiev relented somewhat, with the office of President Petro O. Poroshenko saying it would allow the trucks to cross after they had been inspected by Ukrainian officials and monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Throughout Wednesday, tensions rose in the absence of a clear statement from Russia about where the trucks were headed. Rumors began to fly that they would bypass the original point of entry, the Shebekino crossing, near Kharkiv, Ukraine, — and firmly in Kiev's grasp — and head farther south to an area closer to Luhansk, where Russia and the separatist fighters it supports exert more control.

That would raise the possibility of the trucks entering the country against the warnings of Kiev and without the contents being examined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which Russia has pledged to have oversee the aid delivery.

The Russian government maintained that the convoy was still heading to Ukraine, although exactly where it would not say. It also said that the convoy was still working under the umbrella of the Red Cross, despite statements to the contrary from the organization.

"It is moving in the territory of the Russian Federation; it is still moving," Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, told Russian reporters. "All this is going on in complete coordination with and under the aegis of the Red Cross."

The dispute over the convoy comes as Kiev is bearing down militarily on the separatist rebels, forcing many of them to retreat into the region's two major cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, which they control.

Shelling there and elsewhere in the region by the Ukrainian forces has taken a heavy toll on civilians, with the death toll in the war doubling in the past week to more than 2,000, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported Wednesday.

Conditions in Luhansk, under siege by Ukrainian government forces, are particularly dire. City officials said Tuesday that its 250,000 residents had been living without power, water or a sewage system since Aug. 3, and that only essential food was available.

Nevertheless, both Kiev and its Western allies have warned that the Russian aid convoy was either a cynical ploy to get much-needed military assistance to rebel fighters in Luhansk, who are running low on ammunition, or, in the worst case, the first step in an invasion of southeastern Ukraine.

But for the moment, the 260 or so trucks in the convoy appeared to be idling at a military base in Voronezh, about 200 miles east of the Ukrainian border.

Presuming the convoy does end up at the Shebekino crossing in Kharkiv, there were still issues to be resolved. Both Russia and Ukraine said they were expecting the Red Cross to handle the logistics of the delivery, but officials from the group said the two governments had to agree first on the inspection of the goods and their transfer — if indeed they are transferred — to other vehicles for transport to Luhansk.

"The Russians and the Ukrainians have not agreed on the first step," Pascal Cuttat, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Moscow, said in an interview.

Once the aid material had been inspected and cleared for entry into Ukraine, the Red Cross could take responsibility for it, he said.

That could take time, depending on whether the inspection was by X-ray or by hand.

Agreement had to be reached on questions like whether in a grain shipment every bag would be inspected, he said.

But the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, had already rejected the idea of unloading the goods as impractical and too costly.

Cuttat said it did not matter if the two sides agreed to use the same trucks, different trucks or railroad cars, the point was that the shipment had to clear the border before his organization could start the operation to distribute it.

Officials from both governments said consultations between the foreign ministries were continuing by telephone, as well as through the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva.

Senior Ukrainian officials, convinced that the convoy is a wolf in sheep's clothing, were adamant that no aid would cross the border from Russia into Ukraine on the same trucks that brought the goods from Moscow.

In Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk told a Cabinet meeting that any foreign aid would be received only and exclusively from the Red Cross and under the umbrella of international law.

The interior minister, Arsen Avakov, was more vehement: "A provocation by the cynical aggressor on our territory is unacceptable," he said in a post on his Facebook page that he said was an official statement.

Ukrainians maintain that if Russia was really worried about the humanitarian situation it would rein in the separatists.

There were also statements by other Ukrainian officials saying they were organizing relief convoys. Igor Shvayka, the agriculture minister, for example, said Ukraine would send a convoy of food trucks to Luhansk from Kiev on Thursday.

Russian officials, echoing statements by Lavrov a day earlier, emphasized Wednesday that Ukraine had earlier agreed to take the convoy under Red Cross supervision. They said they hoped the agreement could still be implemented by the time the trucks reached the border.

Since the conflict erupted in March, Russia has argued that Kiev does not respect the needs or interests of the mainly Russian-speaking population of southeastern Ukraine, and the confrontation over the aid convoy risked confirming Moscow's point.